Mashups are fast replacing portals as a means for combining and presenting information to a user. Mashup use is expanding in the business environment. Business mashups are useful for integrating business and data services; business mashup technologies provide the ability to develop new integrated services quickly, to combine internal services with external or personalized information, and to make these services tangible to the business user through user-friendly Web browser interfaces. Business mashups differ from consumer mashups primarily in the level of integration with business computing environments, security, and access control features, governance, and the sophistication of the programming tools (mashup editors) used. Another difference between business mashups and consumer mashups is a growing trend of using business mashups in commercial software as a service offering.
Telecommunications have been slow to adopt mashup technologies and Service Oriented Architectures (“SOA”) to integrate and make available disparate data as discrete Web services. A company called “Ifbyphone” and others have introduced the concept of a “phone mashup” by combining voice forms, one to collect information, another to process the information, and another to display the processed information. A voice form includes prerecorded or text-to-speech prompts and questions that are played for a caller and allows caller responses to be recorded or converted into text. When the caller reaches the end of a voice form, the phone mashup platform passes control to a previously created web page. The web page may be hosted on any server, coded in any language, and either secured or unsecured. The web page will receive the collected data via a telephone dialog (e.g., voice form) as a post or retrieve the information in the same manner as an HTML form. The collected data can be written to a database, used to query another web source, or processed conventionally. The processed information is output by the web page as an XML file which informs the platform what to do next.
As a next step, phone mashups permit the initiation of a click-to-call between two parties, a click-to-virtual receptionist, a click-to-voicemail, a click-to a full featured Interactive Voice Response (“IVR”) system, a click-to a find me with full recording capabilities, or even a disconnection. Phone mashups support the scheduling of voice broadcast messages, reminder calls, and wake up calls. Telephone connections can be initiated not only from a website but also the communications facilitated by phone mashups may be activated from a telephone call. Calls to a provisioned telephone number can, by the phone mashup, be routed based on the caller ANI (caller ID), routed based on the time-of-day or day-of-week, routed to a voice mail account, routed to a find me feature, routed to a virtual receptionist, and routed to an IVR.
Although phone mashups offer a number of benefits, their use has been relatively limited, both in scope and capabilities.